I came, I clicked, I conquered.

I have to admit, before the FIRST IV workshop in spring last year I had never heard of 'clickers' (a.k.a. personal response systems, or the little infrared doodads that students can use to submit their answers to multiple-choice questions posed by the class facilitator).  In this naïve state, my very first experience of their use was an inspiring example of state-of-the-art clicking.  Unfortunately, my real-life-teaching experiences with clickers since then have been underwhelming, so I'm really glad I got to see what they are capable of before I had my dreams of clicker conquest waylaid.  At least I know what I'm aiming for...

What exactly did I witness that gave me such hope for clicker world domination?  It was a demonstration given by faculty experienced with using clicker questions to engage students, reveal misconceptions and tease out those famous 'teachable moments'.  They had the workshop participants already organised into co-operative groups, but asked us to use our clickers to answer the Radish Problem (see here for more) by ourselves.  The radish problem diagnoses common student difficulties in 'tracing matter' that is interconverted during photosynthesis and respiration.  By definition, every participant in the workshop has a PhD in biology, and yet a large proportion of us (maybe half?) got this introductory biology question utterly, hopelessly, wrong.  A great way to get our attention!  Some heated and productive discussion in our groups followed, then more discussion as a class, we were re-polled, and then magically we all knew the answer.  More than that, we won't magically forget the answer (as we obviously had after our extensive and apparently successful undergraduate educations) because we were fully engaged in solving the problem.  Genius.

After this, F1B and I were so enthusiastic about the radish problem that we subjected our entire (rather large) lab to a demonstration of the power of active learning during our next Friday morning lab meeting.  Once again, a 'textbook' discussion ensued, including my very smart P.I. giving a wonderfully lucid and biochemically detailed justification for the wrong answer.

How did it work out in real-life-teaching? 

First off, it seems like you have to administer clicker questions or students simply won't turn up (clickers determine their participation grade).  They even feel ripped off if they don't get a question, since there's no reward for turning up. However, as you might expect, it is really, really hard to write questions as awesome as the radish problem (the dreaded multiple-choice questions!).  All our attempts (and we have 1-2 per class, on average) have apparently been way too easy.  Nearly everyone gets them right, and it's hard to have much engagement or discussion when everyone apparently agrees (even if you have a sneaking suspicion that not everyone really 'gets' it).  However, I will admit that we haven't been getting them to answer by themselves first (i.e. before their neighbours have a chance to tell them the answer).  I suspect this is part of the problem, but I also think our questions really are a bit too easy to work well.  I've also heard jaded and weary faculty complain about the opposite problem: students don't know the answer, discuss and discuss, and then still don't know the answer.  I've never seen that myself, and feel like a spot of expertly-placed Socratic questioning must surely help, but I can see how this situation would also lead to clicker-disenchantment.  The battle continues.

Resources:   There are many resources on clicker questions around, such as those compiled at the CWSEI, or the recently-abandoned ASCB education library BioEducate, including quite a lot of genetics-ey type sample questions from William Wood (of the review article in the previous post) and Jennifer Knight.